MEXICO CITY (23 January 2008)—At the end of January, more than
200,000 crop varieties from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle
East—drawn from vast seed collections maintained by the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—will be shipped to
a remote island near the Arctic Circle, where they will be stored in
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a facility capable of preserving
their vitality for thousands of years.

The cornucopia of rice,
wheat, beans, sorghum, sweet potatoes, lentils, chick peas and a host
of other food, forage and agroforestry plants is to be safeguarded in
the facility, which was created as a repository of last resort for
humanity’s agricultural heritage. The seeds will be shipped to the
village of Longyearbyen on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, where the
vault has been constructed in a mountain deep inside the Arctic
permafrost. The vault was built by the Norwegian government as a
service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO,
the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The vault
will open on 26 February 2008.

This first installment from the
CGIAR collections will contain duplicates from international
agricultural research centers based in Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia,
India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Syria.
Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain 600,000 plant varieties in
crop genebanks, which are widely viewed as the foundation of global
efforts to conserve agricultural biodiversity.

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“Our ability to
endow this facility with such an impressive array of diversity is a
powerful testament to the incredible work of scientists at our centers,
who have been so dedicated to ensuring the survival of the world’s most
important crop species,” said Emile Frison, Director General of
Rome-based Bioversity International, which coordinates CGIAR crop
diversity initiatives.

“The CGIAR collections are the ”crown
jewels’ of international agriculture,” said Cary Fowler, Executive
Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which will cover the costs
of preparing, packaging and transporting CGIAR seeds to the Arctic.
“They include the world’s largest and most diverse collections of rice,
wheat, maize, beans, potato, sweetpotato, cowpea, and other important
food crops. Many traditional landraces of these crops would have been
lost had they not been collected and stored in the genebanks.”

For
example, the wheat collection held just outside Mexico City by the
CGIAR-supported International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center
(CIMMYT) contains 150,000 unique samples of wheat and its relatives
from more than 100 countries. It is the largest unified collection in
the world for a single crop. Overall, the maize collection represents
nearly 90 percent of maize diversity in the Americas, where the crop
originated. CIMMYT will continue to send yearly shipments of
regenerated seed until the entire collection of maize and wheat has
been backed up at Svalbard.

Storage of these and all the other
seeds at Svalbard is intended to ensure that they will be available for
bolstering food security should a manmade or natural disaster threaten
agricultural systems, or even the genebanks themselves, at any point in
the future.

“We need to understand that genebanks are not
seed museums but the repositories of vital, living resources that are
used almost every day in the never-ending battle against major threats
to food production,” Bioversity International’s Frison said. “We’re
going to need this diversity to breed new varieties that can adapt to
climate change, new diseases and other rapidly emerging threats.”

Why are genebanks important?

The CGIAR collections are famous in plant breeding circles as a
treasure trove for plant breeders searching for traits to help them
combat destructive crop diseases and pests, such as the black sigatoka
fungus, which is devastating banana production in East Africa, and
grain borer beetle, which is destroying maize in Kenya.

Just
from January to August of 2007, CGIAR centers distributed almost
100,000 samples. The materials mainly go to researchers and plant
breeders seeking genetic traits to create new crop varieties that offer
such benefits as higher yields, improved nutritional value, resistance
to pests and diseases, and the ability to survive changing climatic
conditions, which are expected to make floods and drought more
frequent.

In addition, these collections have often been used to help restore agricultural systems after conflicts and natural disasters.

For
example, among the 135,000 food and forage seeds maintained at the
CGIAR-supported International Center for Agricultural Research in the
Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Aleppo, Syria, 3,000 varieties are native to
Afghanistan, and 1,000 are from Iraq. The seeds preserved have been
used to help revitalize crop diversity in these war-torn regions.

“Svalbard
will be able to help replenish genebanks if they’re hit,” said Cary
Fowler. Iraq’s genebank in the town of Abu Ghraib was ransacked by
looters in 2003. Fortunately there was a safety duplicate at the CGIAR
center in Syria. Typhoon Xangsane seriously damaged the genebank of the
Philippines national rice genebank in 2006. “Unfortunately, these kinds
of national genebank horror stories are fairly common place,” said
Fowler. “The Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes the CGIAR’s genebank
collections safer than ever.”

After the Asian tsunami
disaster of 2004, the CGIAR-supported International Rice Research
Institute (IRRI) used its collections to provide farmers with rice
varieties suitable for growing in fields that had been inundated with
salt water. The genebank at the CGIAR-supported International Center
for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Palmira, Colombia was instrumental
in providing bean varieties to farmers in Honduras and Nicaragua in the
aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in 1998.

According to Geoff
Hawtin, Acting Director General of CIAT and former executive director
of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust, “The shipments going to
Svalbard from the CGIAR genebanks are a vital measure in conserving the
world’s crop collections. With coming climatic changes, higher food
prices, and expanding markets for biofuels, our best available options
for progress, if not survival, lie in these collections and it is
imperative we take every precaution to safeguard them.